Well, I looked over this a few times, but it’s just not addressing some things that are obvious (except to people for whom they aren’t obvious).
These problems don’t have much to do with the specific argument presented. They arise because you assume that the nature of reality is fully encompassed by physics and/or mathematics and/or computation. I do wonder what would happen to your train of thought if you proceeded in an ontologically agnostic way rather than assuming that.
But for now, I’ll state these obvious problems. The first is the problem of “qualia”. For people who have color vision, I can state it more concretely: color exists in reality, it doesn’t exist in physics, therefore physics is incomplete in some way.
Yes, we are accustomed to identifying color with certain wavelengths of light, and in neuroscience it is assumed that some aspect of brain state corresponds somehow to color experience. But if we ask what is light, and what is a brain, in terms of physics, there’s no actual color in that description. At best, some physical entity that we can describe in terms of particles and fields and quantum dispositions—a description composed solely of geometric, causal, and abstractly numerical properties—also has the property of being or having the actual color.
Furthermore, Cartesian theaters are real. Or at least, it’s an appropriately suggestive name for something quite real, namely being a self experiencing a world. I mention this because this is the context in which we encounter qualia such as colors. It’s really the Cartesian theater as a whole that needs to exist somewhere in our ontology.
In this essay, the way that this issue is addressed is to talk about “representations” and “software”. Insofar as the Cartesian theater exists, it would have to be some kind of maximal representation in a brain. The problem here is that “representation” is as nonexistent in physical or naturalistic ontology as color qualia. Described physically, brains and computer chips are just assemblages of particles whose internal states can be correlated with other assemblages of particles in various ways.
The extra ingredient that is implicitly being added, when people talk about representations, is a form of what philosophers call intentionality, also known as aboutness, or even just meaning. We don’t just want to say that aspects of brain state are correlated with some other physical thing, we want to say that the brain in question is perceiving, or thinking about, or remembering, some possible entity or situation.
The problem for people who want to understand consciousness in terms of natural science, is that qualia and intentionality exist, but they do not exist in fundamental physics, nor do they exist in mathematics or computer science (the other disciplines which our radicals sometimes propose as alternative foundations). Those disciplines in fact arose by focusing only on certain aspects of what is revealed to us in our Cartesian theaters, and these inadequate reductionisms result from trying to treat such partial aspects as the whole.
In reality, the intellectual whole that would be enough to fully characterize the Cartesian theater and any deeper reality beyond it, would indeed include the fundamental concepts of some form of physics and mathematics and computation, but it would also include aspects of conscious reality like qualia and intentionality, along with whatever additional concepts are needed to bind all of that into a whole.
If anyone wants a way to arrive at this whole—and I can’t tell you what it is, because I haven’t got there myself—maybe you could meditate on one of Escher’s famous pictures, “Print Gallery”, and in particular on the blind spot at the center, where in some sense the viewer and the world become one; and then try to understand your own Cartesian theater as a physical “representational homunculus” in your brain, but don’t just stop at the idea that your sense experiences are activity in various sensory cortices. Go as far as you can into the detailed physical reality of what that activity might be, while also bearing in mind that your Cartesian theater is fully real, including those qualic and intentional aspects,
Such thinking is why I expect that consciousness (as opposed to unconscious information processing) does not reduce to trillions of localized neural events, but rather to one of the more holistic things that physics allows, whether it’s entanglement or topological field structures or something else. Empirical evidence that something like that is relevant for conscious cognition would already be a revolution in neuroscience, but it’s still not enough because the fundamental ontology is still just that geometric-causal-numerical ontology; somehow you would need to interpret that, or add to that, so that the full ontology of the Cartesian theater is there in your theory.
At that point your physical ontology might be panpsychic or animistic compared to the old, stark ontology. But something like that has to happen. When thinking about these things, one should not confuse rigor with rigorous exclusion of things we don’t know how to think about. Everything that we can currently think about rigorously, was also once a mysterious vagueness to the human mind. We can discover how to think with precision about these other aspects of reality, without insisting that our existing methods are already enough.
So that’s my ontological manifesto. Now let me return to something else about this essay that I already said: “I do wonder what would happen to your train of thought if you proceeded in an ontologically agnostic way”. It’s clear that one of the intuitions guiding this essay, is monism. The author wants to think of themselves as part of a continuum or plenum that encompasses the rest of existence. I don’t object to this, I just insist that to really carry it through correctly, you would need a mode of thought that is not quite possible yet, because we don’t yet have the basic conceptual synthesis we would need.
For people who have color vision, I can state it more concretely: color exists in reality, it doesn’t exist in physics, therefore physics is incomplete in some way.
You don’t have enough evidence of this. Nothing about your experience of color contradicts it being neurons. Do you agree, that you can have thoughts about your experience of color? Like “I’ve seen blue sky yesterday”. Do you agree that they can be more or less correct, like when you forgot, that actually it was very cloudy all day yesterday? Do you agree that you can describe you experience more or less precisely? Do you agree that your experience has structure? When you say that “color” exists you mean something, that works in specific ways. For example, it does not create blue-sky experiences on very cloudy days. And if you describe these ways precisely enough, you’ll get a description of neurons. What does you think a physical description of you describes, when it describes a difference between a state interpretable as you seeing a blue sky and a state interpretable as you seeing a cloudy sky?
Is it just that you refuse to believe that your experience has any parts you are not aware of?
Nothing about your experience of color contradicts it being neurons. [...]
Is it just that you refuse to believe that your experience has any parts you are not aware of?
The real issue is that nothing about the current physical description of neurons contains the experience of color. I “refuse to believe” that physical descriptions made up of particles and fields and entanglement, in which the only ontological primitives are positions, spins, field values, their rates of change, and superpositions thereof, secretly already contain colors and experiences of color as well.
Physicalists who aren’t thoroughgoing eliminativists or illusionists, are actually dualists. In addition to the properties genuinely posited by physics, they suppose there is another class of property, “how it feels to be that physical entity”, and this is where everything to do with consciousness is located in their system.
I’ve been rolling around the general argument about physical descriptions and qualia around for a while. As far as I can figure, the argument is something like,
Nothing in the current physical descriptions we understand seems to have anything resembling an explanation of qualia like “the feeling of seeing red”
Future physical descriptions must be essentially “grammatical elaborations” of the current ones. Any written book is stuck in the modality of the alphabet, no matter how long or innovative it is.
Since the elementary “alphabet” of physics doesn’t describe qualia, no theory of physics can either.
And my problem here is that this is an awfully confident argument that you get by doing absolutely none of the work you assure would be useless because of the argument. We haven’t done the physical modeling of the process where qualia should be involved, and I think there’s a coherent description of the experiment, even though we’re very far from being able to do it in practice. We have little idea what qualia themselves are, so they’re hard to approach directly, but we have lots of stuff on what humans are and we can do heterophenomenology. So, vast ethical and practical objections aside, the experiment would be simulating the physics of a live adult human from molecular biology up in a lit room with a red object being asked to describe what colors they see and expecting them to respond “I see red”. And then trawling through the full simulation log of just what goes on in the simulated brain.
I see two ways this can go. If the experiment actually succeeds, we should have some very interesting data. Since the modeling proceeds from cells up instead of behavior down, it’s very unlikely we have built a chatbot that mimics surface behavior. Either it’s actually successfully mirroring how humans in the physical world perceive color, or it won’t do anything because the copy of the human neuroarchitecture won’t make sense with whatever the missing secret sauce is. So you might go full mysterian and claim there must be a secret sauce and the model won’t work, but now you’re committed to a falsifiable prediction that the experiment won’t succeed. And the original argument about adding stuff not helping is a non sequitur in this case.
Or the simulation does work. And people do the further work of deciphering all the simulated neural processes. And then we have a readable physics-level explanation of all the stuff that goes on from the 700 nm wavelength light to “I see red”. We don’t know what’s going to be in there. We haven’t done the work, we don’t know what the details will look like if they were spelled out in physics, but the “physics won’t explain the important part” argument concedes this should be doable. And I’m really curious about being able to see this picture. Like, we’re making our judgments now based on the “how things work” schemas we have now. It looks like there’d need to be some structural “how things work” schema that’s unfamiliar to us in that description, so shouldn’t we try to figure it out first instead of going “eh, it’ll just be physics physics physics, who cares”. What if after doing the work people will instead go “Oh, that’s how it works! We had no idea,” and we currently indeed do have no idea?
I’m thinking this might be something like computers (or fractals, or game of life). There’s nothing novel about computers in terms of fundamental ontology, they’re just patterns made of simple physics. Yet there’s a whole discipline about studying what they can do and a huge package of brand new schemas and intuitions about “things doable with computers” completely unknown to top physicists and philosophers for hundreds of years, that people got by learning about a “just some more physics” description and thinking about it for many years.
If you had a correct causal model of someone having a red experience and saying so, your model would include an actual red experience, and some reflective awareness of it, along with whatever other entities and causal relations are involved in producing the final act of speech. I expect that a sufficiently advanced neuroscience would eventually reveal the details. I find it more constructive to try to figure out what those details might be, than to ponder a hypothetical completed neuroscience that vindicates illusionism.
If you had a correct causal model of someone having a red experience and saying so, your model would include an actual red experience, and some reflective awareness of it, along with whatever other entities and causal relations are involved in producing the final act of speech.
The model would quite likely amount to a successful brain emulation which would have a conscious experience like a biological human does when run. Though you get into some conceptual hairiness with whether it’s a case that the model includes the experience qualia, or the execution of the model does. Which would be pretty interesting if it was something that could run on a classical computer.
I find it more constructive to try to figure out what those details might be, than to ponder a hypothetical completed neuroscience that vindicates illusionism.
That was the whole idea in my comment. I feel like the “no matter how much physical detail you add, it can’t add up to explaining consciousness” style of argument is exactly pondering hypothetical completed neuroscience, without doing the work. I don’t know what the completed neuroscience would vindicate because it hasn’t been done and understood yet.
Yes, but why do you refuse to believe it? What’s your evidence that your experience of color is ontologically primitive? It’s just baseless assumption.
Physicalists who aren’t thoroughgoing eliminativists or illusionists, are actually dualists.
Can you imagine believing in dualistic non-physical parts of your experience that you are not aware of?
What’s your evidence that your experience of color is ontologically primitive?
That’s not what I’m saying. Experiences can have parts, qualia can have parts. I’m saying that you can’t build color or experience of color, just from the “geometric-causal-numerical” ingredients of standard physical ontology. Given just those ingredients in your ontological recipe, “subjective feels” don’t come for free. You could have the qualia alongside the geometric-causal-numerical (property dualism), or you could have the qualia instead of that (monistic panpsychism), or you might have some other relationship between qualia and physics. But if you only have physics (in any form from Newton to the present day), you don’t have qualia.
or you could have the qualia instead of that (monistic panpsychism)
Physics is monistic panpsychism—there are no just geometric-causal-numerical ingredients, there is also implicit statement that universe that equations describe has intrinsic property of existence.
Well, I looked over this a few times, but it’s just not addressing some things that are obvious (except to people for whom they aren’t obvious).
These problems don’t have much to do with the specific argument presented. They arise because you assume that the nature of reality is fully encompassed by physics and/or mathematics and/or computation. I do wonder what would happen to your train of thought if you proceeded in an ontologically agnostic way rather than assuming that.
But for now, I’ll state these obvious problems. The first is the problem of “qualia”. For people who have color vision, I can state it more concretely: color exists in reality, it doesn’t exist in physics, therefore physics is incomplete in some way.
Yes, we are accustomed to identifying color with certain wavelengths of light, and in neuroscience it is assumed that some aspect of brain state corresponds somehow to color experience. But if we ask what is light, and what is a brain, in terms of physics, there’s no actual color in that description. At best, some physical entity that we can describe in terms of particles and fields and quantum dispositions—a description composed solely of geometric, causal, and abstractly numerical properties—also has the property of being or having the actual color.
Furthermore, Cartesian theaters are real. Or at least, it’s an appropriately suggestive name for something quite real, namely being a self experiencing a world. I mention this because this is the context in which we encounter qualia such as colors. It’s really the Cartesian theater as a whole that needs to exist somewhere in our ontology.
In this essay, the way that this issue is addressed is to talk about “representations” and “software”. Insofar as the Cartesian theater exists, it would have to be some kind of maximal representation in a brain. The problem here is that “representation” is as nonexistent in physical or naturalistic ontology as color qualia. Described physically, brains and computer chips are just assemblages of particles whose internal states can be correlated with other assemblages of particles in various ways.
The extra ingredient that is implicitly being added, when people talk about representations, is a form of what philosophers call intentionality, also known as aboutness, or even just meaning. We don’t just want to say that aspects of brain state are correlated with some other physical thing, we want to say that the brain in question is perceiving, or thinking about, or remembering, some possible entity or situation.
The problem for people who want to understand consciousness in terms of natural science, is that qualia and intentionality exist, but they do not exist in fundamental physics, nor do they exist in mathematics or computer science (the other disciplines which our radicals sometimes propose as alternative foundations). Those disciplines in fact arose by focusing only on certain aspects of what is revealed to us in our Cartesian theaters, and these inadequate reductionisms result from trying to treat such partial aspects as the whole.
In reality, the intellectual whole that would be enough to fully characterize the Cartesian theater and any deeper reality beyond it, would indeed include the fundamental concepts of some form of physics and mathematics and computation, but it would also include aspects of conscious reality like qualia and intentionality, along with whatever additional concepts are needed to bind all of that into a whole.
If anyone wants a way to arrive at this whole—and I can’t tell you what it is, because I haven’t got there myself—maybe you could meditate on one of Escher’s famous pictures, “Print Gallery”, and in particular on the blind spot at the center, where in some sense the viewer and the world become one; and then try to understand your own Cartesian theater as a physical “representational homunculus” in your brain, but don’t just stop at the idea that your sense experiences are activity in various sensory cortices. Go as far as you can into the detailed physical reality of what that activity might be, while also bearing in mind that your Cartesian theater is fully real, including those qualic and intentional aspects,
Such thinking is why I expect that consciousness (as opposed to unconscious information processing) does not reduce to trillions of localized neural events, but rather to one of the more holistic things that physics allows, whether it’s entanglement or topological field structures or something else. Empirical evidence that something like that is relevant for conscious cognition would already be a revolution in neuroscience, but it’s still not enough because the fundamental ontology is still just that geometric-causal-numerical ontology; somehow you would need to interpret that, or add to that, so that the full ontology of the Cartesian theater is there in your theory.
At that point your physical ontology might be panpsychic or animistic compared to the old, stark ontology. But something like that has to happen. When thinking about these things, one should not confuse rigor with rigorous exclusion of things we don’t know how to think about. Everything that we can currently think about rigorously, was also once a mysterious vagueness to the human mind. We can discover how to think with precision about these other aspects of reality, without insisting that our existing methods are already enough.
So that’s my ontological manifesto. Now let me return to something else about this essay that I already said: “I do wonder what would happen to your train of thought if you proceeded in an ontologically agnostic way”. It’s clear that one of the intuitions guiding this essay, is monism. The author wants to think of themselves as part of a continuum or plenum that encompasses the rest of existence. I don’t object to this, I just insist that to really carry it through correctly, you would need a mode of thought that is not quite possible yet, because we don’t yet have the basic conceptual synthesis we would need.
You don’t have enough evidence of this. Nothing about your experience of color contradicts it being neurons. Do you agree, that you can have thoughts about your experience of color? Like “I’ve seen blue sky yesterday”. Do you agree that they can be more or less correct, like when you forgot, that actually it was very cloudy all day yesterday? Do you agree that you can describe you experience more or less precisely? Do you agree that your experience has structure? When you say that “color” exists you mean something, that works in specific ways. For example, it does not create blue-sky experiences on very cloudy days. And if you describe these ways precisely enough, you’ll get a description of neurons. What does you think a physical description of you describes, when it describes a difference between a state interpretable as you seeing a blue sky and a state interpretable as you seeing a cloudy sky?
Is it just that you refuse to believe that your experience has any parts you are not aware of?
The real issue is that nothing about the current physical description of neurons contains the experience of color. I “refuse to believe” that physical descriptions made up of particles and fields and entanglement, in which the only ontological primitives are positions, spins, field values, their rates of change, and superpositions thereof, secretly already contain colors and experiences of color as well.
Physicalists who aren’t thoroughgoing eliminativists or illusionists, are actually dualists. In addition to the properties genuinely posited by physics, they suppose there is another class of property, “how it feels to be that physical entity”, and this is where everything to do with consciousness is located in their system.
I’ve been rolling around the general argument about physical descriptions and qualia around for a while. As far as I can figure, the argument is something like,
Nothing in the current physical descriptions we understand seems to have anything resembling an explanation of qualia like “the feeling of seeing red”
Future physical descriptions must be essentially “grammatical elaborations” of the current ones. Any written book is stuck in the modality of the alphabet, no matter how long or innovative it is.
Since the elementary “alphabet” of physics doesn’t describe qualia, no theory of physics can either.
And my problem here is that this is an awfully confident argument that you get by doing absolutely none of the work you assure would be useless because of the argument. We haven’t done the physical modeling of the process where qualia should be involved, and I think there’s a coherent description of the experiment, even though we’re very far from being able to do it in practice. We have little idea what qualia themselves are, so they’re hard to approach directly, but we have lots of stuff on what humans are and we can do heterophenomenology. So, vast ethical and practical objections aside, the experiment would be simulating the physics of a live adult human from molecular biology up in a lit room with a red object being asked to describe what colors they see and expecting them to respond “I see red”. And then trawling through the full simulation log of just what goes on in the simulated brain.
I see two ways this can go. If the experiment actually succeeds, we should have some very interesting data. Since the modeling proceeds from cells up instead of behavior down, it’s very unlikely we have built a chatbot that mimics surface behavior. Either it’s actually successfully mirroring how humans in the physical world perceive color, or it won’t do anything because the copy of the human neuroarchitecture won’t make sense with whatever the missing secret sauce is. So you might go full mysterian and claim there must be a secret sauce and the model won’t work, but now you’re committed to a falsifiable prediction that the experiment won’t succeed. And the original argument about adding stuff not helping is a non sequitur in this case.
Or the simulation does work. And people do the further work of deciphering all the simulated neural processes. And then we have a readable physics-level explanation of all the stuff that goes on from the 700 nm wavelength light to “I see red”. We don’t know what’s going to be in there. We haven’t done the work, we don’t know what the details will look like if they were spelled out in physics, but the “physics won’t explain the important part” argument concedes this should be doable. And I’m really curious about being able to see this picture. Like, we’re making our judgments now based on the “how things work” schemas we have now. It looks like there’d need to be some structural “how things work” schema that’s unfamiliar to us in that description, so shouldn’t we try to figure it out first instead of going “eh, it’ll just be physics physics physics, who cares”. What if after doing the work people will instead go “Oh, that’s how it works! We had no idea,” and we currently indeed do have no idea?
I’m thinking this might be something like computers (or fractals, or game of life). There’s nothing novel about computers in terms of fundamental ontology, they’re just patterns made of simple physics. Yet there’s a whole discipline about studying what they can do and a huge package of brand new schemas and intuitions about “things doable with computers” completely unknown to top physicists and philosophers for hundreds of years, that people got by learning about a “just some more physics” description and thinking about it for many years.
If you had a correct causal model of someone having a red experience and saying so, your model would include an actual red experience, and some reflective awareness of it, along with whatever other entities and causal relations are involved in producing the final act of speech. I expect that a sufficiently advanced neuroscience would eventually reveal the details. I find it more constructive to try to figure out what those details might be, than to ponder a hypothetical completed neuroscience that vindicates illusionism.
The model would quite likely amount to a successful brain emulation which would have a conscious experience like a biological human does when run. Though you get into some conceptual hairiness with whether it’s a case that the model includes the experience qualia, or the execution of the model does. Which would be pretty interesting if it was something that could run on a classical computer.
That was the whole idea in my comment. I feel like the “no matter how much physical detail you add, it can’t add up to explaining consciousness” style of argument is exactly pondering hypothetical completed neuroscience, without doing the work. I don’t know what the completed neuroscience would vindicate because it hasn’t been done and understood yet.
Yes, but why do you refuse to believe it? What’s your evidence that your experience of color is ontologically primitive? It’s just baseless assumption.
Can you imagine believing in dualistic non-physical parts of your experience that you are not aware of?
That’s not what I’m saying. Experiences can have parts, qualia can have parts. I’m saying that you can’t build color or experience of color, just from the “geometric-causal-numerical” ingredients of standard physical ontology. Given just those ingredients in your ontological recipe, “subjective feels” don’t come for free. You could have the qualia alongside the geometric-causal-numerical (property dualism), or you could have the qualia instead of that (monistic panpsychism), or you might have some other relationship between qualia and physics. But if you only have physics (in any form from Newton to the present day), you don’t have qualia.
Oh, ok, I misunderstood you.
Physics is monistic panpsychism—there are no just geometric-causal-numerical ingredients, there is also implicit statement that universe that equations describe has intrinsic property of existence.